Top 10 Hits and Misses for 2011

Dec 22, 2011 | The supercomputing biz seems to have shaken off most of the after-effects of the global recession, with scads of new deployments large and small around the world. China, in particular, continued its big push into HPC, notching its first home-grown super. And Japan ushered in the era of 10-petaflop supercomputing this year with its world-beating K Computer. But, as always, not all the HPC news was rosy. Here are the top hits and misses for the year.
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Thinking Forward: A Conversation with Wolfram Research Co-Founder Theo Gray

Dec 20, 2011 | Besides his day job as Director of User Interface Technology at Wolfram Research, Theodore (Theo) Gray is also an award-winning science writer, a role he uses to communicate his boundless enthusiasm for science, technology, the arts, and how they interact. Recently he founded Touch Press, an electronic book publishing company that Gray hopes will further that cause. In this wide-ranging interview, Gray talks about his new Touch Press venture, Wolfram|Alpha, science education, software, cloud computing, and HPC.
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BGI Speeds Genome Analysis with GPUs

Dec 15, 2011 | The data deluge in the life sciences is no where more acute than at Chinese genomics powerhouse BGI, which probably sequences more DNA than any other organization in the world. To turn that data into something meaningful for genomic researchers, the institute has begun to employ GPU-accelerated HPC to greatly reduce processing times. In doing so, BGI was able to increase computational throughput by an order of magnitude or more.
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NVIDIA Opens Up CUDA Compiler

Dec 13, 2011 | GPU maker NVIDIA is going to make its CUDA compiler runtime source code, and internal representation format public, opening up the technology for different programming languages and processor architectures. The announcement was made on Wednesday at the kick-off of the GPU Technology Conference Asia in Beijing, China.
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Emerging Companies Ride Wave of GPU Computing

Dec 15, 2011 | This week at GTC Asia in Beijing, NVIDIA highlighted a number of young companies making use of GPU computing during its Emerging Companies Summit. The companies selected fit into a range of HPC, cloud and mobile markets that are meeting an ever-expanding array of verticals, both in traditional high performance computing arenas and in broader consumer contexts.
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Ten Ways to Fool the Masses When Giving Performance Results on GPUs

Dec 13, 2011 | The performance potential of GPU computing has produced significant excitement in the HPC community. However, as was the case with the advent of parallel computing decades ago, the nascent technology does not equally benefit all applications -- or even all components of a single application. Alas, modest speedups from GPU acceleration are rarely publication-worthy, a fact that occasionally leads GPU zealots to adopt scientifically dubious techniques to artificially inflate the performance benefit of GPU computing to more impressive levels.
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Arm Yourselves for Exascale, Part 2

Dec 12, 2011 | In Part 1 of this two-part series, I advocated that we should explore the use of ARM-architecture processors in high performance computing for three reasons: its innovation, its ubiquity in the marketplace, and its ability to be customized. In Part 2, I look at some of the challenges of the architecture as well as several missing pieces of the ecosystem.
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Revisiting Supercomputer Architectures

Dec 08, 2011 | Additional performance increases for supercomputers are being confounded by three walls: the power wall, the memory wall and the datacenter wall (the "wall wall"). To overcome these hurdles, the market is currently looking to a combination of four strategies: parallel applications development, adding accelerators to standard commodity compute nodes, developing new purpose-built systems, and waiting for a technology breakthrough.
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NVIDIA Eyes Post-CUDA Era of GPU Computing

Dec 07, 2011 | Lost in the flotilla of vendor news at the Supercomputing Conference (SC11) in Seattle last month was the announcement of a new directives-based parallel programming standard for accelerators. Called OpenACC, the open standard is intended to bring GPU computing into the realm of the average programmer, while making the resulting code portable across other accelerators and even multicore CPUs.
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Flash Forward: SDSC Launches Data-Intensive Supercomputer

Dec 06, 2011 | Gordon, the largest flash memory-based computer on the planet, was officially launched at a ceremony that took place on Monday at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). Two years in the making, and backed by a $20 million Track 2 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Gordon represents the first really big purpose-built supercomputer for data-intensive applications.
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IBM Will Chip in on Micron's 3D Hybrid Memory Cube

Nov 30, 2011 | Micron Technology's Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) got a big boost this week when IBM announced it will be supply some critical support for the technology. HMC is a 3D integrated memory chip that Micron is touting as a revolutionary device designed to make a direct assault on the memory wall.
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HPC Experts Provide Glue Between Supercomputers and Climate Science

Nov 30, 2011 | Some of the most important supercomputing models aimed at climate change research have been developed by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and in particular, its Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) at Princeton University. The GFDL researchers are experts in climate science, but as with many scientists, are often less adept with the vagaries of supercomputing technology. That's where HPTi comes in.
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NVIDIA Tegra Processors Blaze the Way for ARM in Supercomputing

Nov 23, 2011 | As has become apparent to nearly everyone in the HPC community, life beyond petascale supercomputing will be power limited. Many efforts around the world are now underway to address this problem, both by commercial interests and researchers. One such effort that brings both into play is the Mont-Blanc research project at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, which is looking to exploit ARM processors, GPUs, and other off-the-shelf technologies to produce radically energy-efficient supercomputers.
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Lustre Vendors Consider File System's Future

Nov 22, 2011 | Thanks to the efforts of many in the HPC community, Lustre appears to be here to stay. We contacted three leading Lustre vendors about what lies ahead for the popular HPC open source file system, asking Xyratex Storage Software Director Peter Bojanic, Whamcloud CEO Brent Gorda, and Terascala Marketing and Product Management VP Rick Friedman for their perspectives on what Lustre needs for broader commercial use as well as how it can make its way into the world of exascale supercomputing.
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Software Tools Will Need Refresh for ORNL's Titan Supercomputer

Nov 21, 2011 | In 2012 Oak Ridge National Laboratory will initiate a major upgrade of Jaguar using the latest CPUs and GPUs, resulting in a new 10-20 petaflop supercomputer called Titan. Such a system will require the a concerted effort of many teams at ORNL, including the Application Performance Tools Group, headed by Richard Graham. In this interview he describes the challenges of bringing all the supercomputing software tools up to speed for the new system.
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DataDirect Pushes Storage Appliance to Next Level

Nov 09, 2011 | On Wednesday, DataDirect Networks unveiled its new Storage Fusion Architecture (SFA) system, the SFA12K, its third generation SFA platform. Like previous SFA offerings, this one, of course, is aimed at super-sized HPC machines, but it is also targeted at big data applications that are spreading across the Internet and infiltrating enterprise datacenters.
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Arm Yourselves for Exascale, Part 1

Nov 09, 2011 | Today's largest HPC systems are dominated by processors using two instruction sets, x86 and Power, controlled by three vendors: Intel, AMD and IBM. These processors have been typically designed for the highest single thread performance, but suffer from high cost and power demand. As we build even larger and higher performance systems moving towards exascale, we might explore other avenues for delivering cost-efficient compute performance and reducing the power consumed by these systems.
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Intel Debuts New HPC Cluster Tool Suite

Nov 08, 2011 | This week Intel unveiled its upmarket version of its Cluster Studio offering aimed at performance-minded MPI application developers. Called Cluster Studio XE, the jazzed-up developer suite adds Intel analysis tools to make it easier for programmers to optimize and tune codes for maximum performance. It also includes the latest compilers, runtimes, and MPI library to keep pace with the new developments in parallel programming.
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Japan Looks to Retain Supercomputing Crown with 10-Petaflop K Machine

Nov 03, 2011 | Just three and half years after IBM broke the petaflop barrier with its Roadrunner supercomputer, Fujitsu's "K Computer" has passed the 10 petaflops mark. Fujitsu and RIKEN announced on Tuesday that they have completed the final build-out of the system and achieved 10.51 petaflops on Linpack, reaching a major milestone of Japan's Next-Generation Supercomputing Project.
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Appro Boosts Flagship Product Line with Latest CPUs, Accelerators

Nov 02, 2011 | Now that the new AMD "Interlagos" Opterons and Intel "Sandy Bridge" EP Xeons have begun shipping, at least for volume deployments, Appro has announced support for the latest x86 CPUs in its upgraded Xtreme-X HPC line-up. The new systems will soon be appearing in supercomputing centers in the US and elsewhere.
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China's Indigenous Supercomputing Strategy Bears First Fruit

Nov 01, 2011 | If anyone wasn't taking China seriously as a contender for supercomputing supremacy, such doubts should have been dispelled last week when the New York Times reported that the nation has deployed its first petascale supercomputer built with domestically produced CPUs. And it's not just the processors that were homegrown. Most major components of the new machine were designed and built with native engineering, including the liquid cooling technology, the system network, and the software stack.
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Climate Workshop Will Explore Data-Intensive Research Methods

Oct 31, 2011 | One of the most promising use cases for "Big Data" is to help advance climate research. At SC11, Reinhard Budich (Max Planck Institute for Meteorology), John Feo (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) Tobias Weigel (DKRZ) and Per Nyberg (Cray) will co-host the second Climate Knowledge Discovery (CKD) workshop to explore new data-intensive methods. HPCwire talked about this with Budich and Feo.
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Texas Instruments Makes HPC Play with New Multicore DSP Chips

Oct 27, 2011 | A funny thing happened on the way to 4G telecommunications. When Texas Instruments (TI) added floating point smarts to its new digital signal processor (DSP) to support the fourth-generation wireless standard, it found itself with a commercial chip that had some of the most impressive flops/watt performance on the planet. And that got some of the folks at TI wondering if they could parlay that into the ethereal world of high performance computing.
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Rensselaer Orders Up Blue Gene/Q for Exascale and Data-Intensive Research

Oct 25, 2011 | Last month Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute announced it had been awarded a $2.65 million grant to acquire a 100 teraflop Blue Gene/Q supercomputer for its Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations. The new system will also include a multi-terabyte RAM-based storage accelerator, petascale disk storage, and rendering cluster plus remote display wall system for visualization.
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Big Data Rains Down on Seattle

Oct 20, 2011 | At SC11 in Seattle, the stage is set for data-intensive computing to steal the show. This year's theme correlates directly to the "big data" trend that is reshaping enterprise and scientific computing. We give an insider's view of some of the top sessions for the big data crowd and a broader sense of how this year's conference is shaping up overall.
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